Book Review: To Date or Not to Date: What the Bible Says about Premarital Relationships

I recently purchased D. Kevin Brown's new short book on dating. As part of the Energion Publications Topical Line Drives series, To Date or Notto Date is a very short work that offers a counter-cultural view of the progression of relationships that all too often involves a lengthy period of dating.

I agree with most of what Kevin has to say. The dating culture infects the church to essentially the same extent it does the world. This is a culture that seeks to delay marriage for as long as possible and serves to create an acceptance of "falling in love" and then breaking up as a normal behavior. We wonder why the "church" has such a problem with divorce and never ask what we are doing to prevent this other than giving kids a pep talk on chastity while thrusting them into a model where intimacy ahead of marriage is almost inevitable and the idea of "breaking up" when things get rough or stale follows them into marriage.

According to Kevin there is a better way. I agree. It is not the job of Christian parents to drive their kids to Youth Group every week and then toss them out into the world to sample as many dating partners as possible before "finding the one" or settling because the biological clock is ticking. Parents should be far more involved in guiding their children through the process of finding a marriage partner than they are in driving kids to sporting events and selecting a college.

There is not really much that is new in To Date or Not to Date. A lot of this ground has been covered by much longer and comprehensive works. To introduce ground-breaking information is not Kevin's intent and not really the purpose of the Topical Line Drives series. This instead serves as a good introduction to a topic that seems incredibly foreign to most religious Americans. It is quite inexpensive as an e-book from Amazon, a mere $.99 and it is a great way to introduce new parents to planning for the inevitable conversations that will happen. 

Ditching Dating

Few topics in the church cause as much angst as parenting and few topics turn ugly quite as quickly. Parenting is almost universally considered to be one of the highest callings in the church and many parents are hypersensitive to any suggestion that they way they parent is "the wrong way" because it is seen, and sometimes intended, as a suggestion of being unfaithful in that calling. It is a minefield and so many times we just avoid the conversation because many of us have seen the way things get out of hand. All you need to do is read a widely disseminated blog when it talks about homeschool vs. public school. Anyway, that doesn't change the reality that being Christians and parents at the same time is fraught with peril, bad advice and overwhelming influence from the culture and the world and because of that we need to think about and work through these issues. I don't think it is loving to just shrug our shoulders and assume that every parenting choice is value neutral. There is no silver bullet in parenting but when it comes to raising children I think the Scriptures give us guidelines on how we should approach topics like education, discipline and dating. My post today has to do with dating, something that I am unequivocally and unapologetically opposed to.

I made this comment during a Facebook discussion on the topic of dating today, a conversation that was triggered by a somewhat tongue in cheek post titled So You Want To Date My Daughter? ...

I wasn't a Christian until I was around 30 and I absolutely would not want my daughters dating anyone who was like me when I was young. Did I turn out alright? I think so but I certainly carry a lot of baggage around from those days, baggage that impacts my marriage to this day. I don't believe in having my daughters dating guys that are not in a place where they are thinking about marriage in the hopes that they will settle down and grow up. I know lots of young men who are in their early twenties and are marriage minded now. If one of them is interested in one of my daughters then I would love to have a conversation with him. If they are not in a place where they are ready for marriage, they need to look elsewhere. I am not a believer in dating for the sake of dating.

I am dead serious that I would not want nor will I permit my daughters to date someone who is like me when I was their age. That is a harsh reality check for me to write as someone who has always had a pretty high opinion of myself. When I was in my teens and early twenties I was someone I don't care much for now. Even though I was dating and then married to my wife during most of that time I wasn't the sort of guy that my daughters should seek out as spouses. I think the post about "you want to date my daughter" raises some great points even if I don't agree with all of them or even the premise of dating in the first place. That doesn't mean locking your kids away until you find someone for them to marry but it does mean an intentionality in preparing your kids for marriage that goes beyond teaching them to date without being sexual active. That is part of it, a huge part of it, but the emotional toll of dating is every bit as real as the physical toll of being sexually active. Teaching our kids, especially our daughters, to guard their hearts is every bit as important as teaching them to guard their purity. 



How then should teens and even young adults interact with other teens and young adults of the opposite gender? Giving them some tools and then sending them out to "date" until they find someone they "fall in love with" to marry? I don't think so. Getting that emotionally involved with someone that is just a "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" is a recipe for disaster. I don't think that dating and having your heart broken, getting over the break-up and then trying it again with the same eventual result until you finally find someone is a necessary life experience that prepares you for a successful marriage. Quite the opposite in fact. It teaches you that if you don't like the one you are with you can just move on and find someone better. The culture of sexual promiscuity and rampant divorce in our culture is not the result of parents not letting their children date. There must be a better way. Not a uniform, cookie cutter way but a different way.


These words seem foreign to our ears. That is not how things are done. Even in the church we simply modify the "date, fall in love, fall out love, break up, find someone new, repeat" cycle with some youth group activities and some moralistic teachings on abstinence. It is painfully obvious that the church culture utterly fails to prepare young people to find their spouse just as it utterly fails to equip them for the work of ministry. I would hazard a guess that many church going parents have had far more conversations and are more deeply involved in the decision about where their son or daughter is going to go to college than about who they will marry. I would also say that picking one college over another has almost no long term impact on a happy, God honoring life but who you marry is one of the most crucial decision any Christian who is called to marriage will ever make. Just look at a Christian couple you know that has been married 30, 40 or more years and you will see that God knew what He was doing when He made men and women in such a way that they rely on each other.


Your kids don't need to date in high school or even as a young adult. They don't need to "just get out there" and see what they find. There is nothing about the culture of casual or even serious serial dating that better prepares a young person for married life. Nothing. There is also not a black and white either-or dichotomy between keeping your daughters locked up in a closet until their wedding day and a free for all, hope the best approach. Let me be clear that I don't think that means a compromise with the culture. Setting an 11 o'clock curfew instead of midnight is not exactly what I mean. What I am talking about is setting forth clear guidelines to look for in a spouse. My daughters should look for men who are serious about the faith, serious about marriage and family and men who are starting to exhibit the characteristic of godliness. I don't expect a twenty year old to have a fully fleshed doctrine of family and marriage (although men and women used to accomplish more before their twentieth birthday than many of us do in our entire lives today thanks to the prolonged period of "adolescence" that excuses and encourages immaturity. Different soap box.) but they need to be growing in their faith. Likewise my sons need to be the sort of men that a Christian parent would want their daughter to marry. It is absolutely necessary that parents help create opportunities for their kids to get to know other kids of the opposite gender. That requires some work especially if your kids are homeschooled. We are struggling with this but that is our fault, not the fault of this principle. I would expect that any young man who is interested in one of my daughters would first speak to his own father and then to me before he approaches my daughter and that if my sons are interested in a young woman that they would first speak to me and then that young ladies father before approaching her.Most importantly, until a young person is ready to start looking for a marriage partner they have no compelling reason to be "dating" or courting. One on one exclusivity is something that there is plenty of time for when both parties are ready to get married. If one or both parties is not at that stage, why do they need to date? 


Of course not every Christian teen that dates is going to end up heartbroken and sexually active just as the opposite charge that Christian teens who grow up in a "strict" household are going to turn into wild sex crazed adults as a backlash against their repressive parents is not true. Ultimately the measuring stick is not pragmatism or even results. It is how we as parents should raise our children. Dating is completely absent from Scripture and is a fairly modern invention. Having a more permissive parenting culture has obviously not led to happier, better adjusted adults but any suggestion that perhaps it is unhealthy is met with scorn and often anger. There is a better way. It requires work and it requires patience but that comes with the territory of being a mom and a dad. The culture and the world don't have any say over how you raise your kids. You do. God gave these kids to you to raise. Not to the TV, not to the government or the schools or even the church. They are your calling, your ministry and outside of seeing them come to Christ as God wills there is nothing more important you can do for them than preparing them and guiding them in finding their lifelong spouse.

Is this the culture we want for our daughters?

I read an article Voddie Baucham linked to regarding the dating experience of young women prior to getting married: Your Prince Is 22 Frogs Away. I don’t think this is a scientific poll and the sample is pretty small but the results are kind of what you would expect to see. These are some of the key finding:

The average woman will kiss 22 men, have four long-term relationships and get her heart broken five times before meeting “the one”, a study claims.

The path to true love will also see her endure six bad dates, have six one-night stands and be cheated on four times before finding her perfect match.

The typical woman will have met at least one partner online, been taken on holiday by three different men and had three long- distance relationships.

One-in-five even say they have a child with someone else before finding their soulmate – and most have lived with two men before they meet Mr Right.

Huh, why is Western culture such a mess? Even if this is half-right it paints a grotesque picture. The result? The typical young woman has endured years and years of heart break and sexual promiscuity before finally finding “the one”. Likely their spouse has experienced a similar series of dates, one night stands, live in relationships and multiple break-ups.

It is sadly true that many Christians follow a similar method. Sure there is the added touch of sending your kid to youth groups and making them go to church every Sunday but the end result is pushing your daughters out the door at 18 to go find themselves and eventually stumble across a spouse. How many of our daughters go through the same horrifying process of heartbreak after heartbreak before settling down?

As Voddie Baucham said in his link, there must be a better way! A better way than throwing our daughters into a world full of men fully willing to use and discard them, a world where women finally enter marriage with their hearts calloused by the scars of our dating culture. A hard, cynical heart familiar with disappointments is hardly a heart conducive to a happy marriage. Some may say this is all part of “growing up” but I say it is one of the leading reasons marriage is so discounted and divorce is so prevalent.

The same holds true for our sons and often we have a double standard here. We must be teaching them that women are not merely objects be chased for gratification but image bearers of God to be respected, cherished and loved. If your image of women is formed by years of serial dating, pornography and the constant barrage of women in the popular culture, why would we expect our sons to be husband who love their wives as Christ loved the church?

It makes marriage harder when one or both partners bring baggage to the marriage from previous relationships. There are plenty of memories that linger in the mind for a lifetime. I remember lots of stuff that I wish I didn’t but once that gets in your memory it is impossible to get it back out. I am speaking as someone who started dating my wife when I was 15 and I can only imagine what it must be like to be in today’s casual sexuality and hooking-up culture for my teens and twenties.

I can’t recommend enough What He Must Be If He Wants To Marry My Daughter by Voddie Baucham. I review it here and I think I might read it again!

Deciding on the person they will marry is the most important decision your child will make and parents simply must encourage their kids to seek their guidance in this process. There isn’t a foolproof “method” for ensuring marital bliss but having parents help guide their young adult children to be marriage minded instead of dating minded is a good first start. We need to instill in our daughters that a guy who is not interested in marriage, no matter how swell, is not someone they should waste their time on.

The choice of a spouse is more important than where our children will go to college or where they will live or what job they will have. Such an important decision requires as much loving guidance as possible.

Interesting article on the case for early marriage

My wife and I got married early by today's standards. I proposed Thanksgiving break of my freshman year of college. We got married when I was twenty and moreover we had two kids while I was finishing up school. Getting married that young is unusual and getting more so by the year, even among people who should be the most married-minded: young evangelical Christians. We were not Christians, I had zero interest in religion at all so I have not experienced the evangelical singles or teen culture. Clearly though something is amiss in that very same culture.

Because of that sense that "something is wrong", I found a very interesting article in Christianity Today. That in and of itself is pretty unusual, because an awful lot of what is published in CT is inane and squishy. The article is The Case for Early Marriage by Mark Regnerus, and he makes a number of interesting observations.

Regnerus makes an interesting case that we have done a ton of work in discouraging premarital sex among Christian youth but haven't given them a corresponding lesson on getting married while in our younger years. As the adult years stretch on and marriage continues to be put off, the natural, God given desires of the flesh tend to win out over the chastity pledges. Humans by and large are not designed to be abstinent. Thus the gift of marriage is given to us to provide for a means by which sexual desire can be experienced in a God honoring way, more often than not leading to the gift of children. Our message is by and large "wait", "wait" to have sex and "wait" to get married until you are "ready'". Guess what, you will never be ready to be married! You can be as prepared as possible, and should be, but no training or perceived maturity can fully prepare you for being married. By telling our kids to wait to get married, we prolong adolescence...

As a result, many men postpone growing up. Even their workplace performance is suffering: earnings for 25- to 34-year-old men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971, even after accounting for inflation. No wonder young women marry men who are on average at least two years older than they. Unfortunately, a key developmental institution for men—marriage—is the very thing being postponed, thus perpetuating their adolescence.

I think by and large he is right. We want our kids to "experience" all sorts of things, and be financially secure, and be mature but in reality what helps to mature us the most, especially men, is marriage itself. Young men now are able to perpetuate adolescence for a decade or more after high school. Little wonder we are in the state we are in. More...

Most young Americans no longer think of marriage as a formative institution, but rather as the institution they enter once they think they are fully formed. Increasing numbers of young evangelicals think likewise, and, by integrating these ideas with the timeless imperative to abstain from sex before marriage, we've created a new optimal life formula for our children: Marriage is glorious, and a big deal. But it must wait. And with it, sex. Which is seldom as patient.

People used to get married much earlier, have kids much earlier and have more of them. I think you would be hard pressed to make the case that people are happier now than they were "back then". Without preparing our kids to be married, a realistic picture not some idealized fairy tale, and teach them the theology of marriage, of gender, of sex, of children, of headship we will continue to see people getting married later and later and the intervening years filled with immorality. Not to excuse immoral behavior, but a pledge to wait until you are ready for marriage is a lot easier to keep than a pledge to wait until marriage to become sexually active.

Not everything is accurate. At one point he says:

Indeed, age integration is one of the unique hallmarks of the institutional church, tacitly contesting the strict age-separation patterns that have long characterized American schools and universities.

Um, I don't know that I agree with that. Most churches, especially heavily institutionalized churches, tend to divide people up heavily. There are Sunday school classes for this age and that category of people, so you tend to go to Sunday school in bigger churches with people who look like you. The older people do their own field trips. The young adults have mixers. Sure we are blended together in the sanctuary, but that is anything but a setting for inter-generational fellowship.

I would say this. We need to spend our kids formative years preparing them for courtship and marriage, even more so that preparing them for college and career. Along with that, parents, and the church as a whole, need to spend a lot more time teaching our kids about gender, marriage, family life, the relationship between husbands and wives, parents and children. I have said before, we spend a ton of time worrying about schools for our kids, making the right college choices etc, and even send kids to Christian colleges because of the right atmosphere, but spend far too little time preparing them for courtship and marriage. We tell them what not to do (i.e. no premarital sex) and not nearly enough telling them what the Bible tells us they should do, that they should anticipate and cherish marriage. Not as something that is the end result of becoming adults but as something that is highly formative in becoming adults.

Give the article a read. I think it is right on in many places and generally challenging to our assumptions in America in 2009.

Book Review: What he must be...if he wants to marry my daughter

So I just finished reading Voddie Baucham's new book, What he must be...if he wants to marry my daughter.

One word: WOW!

The world we live in and the way we live in it demands change from Christian parents. Not just tinkering around the edges, but radical, wholesale change to the way we approach parenting. Most, and I say that with full assurance, books on “Christian” parenting are of minimal use, if any, because they see Christian parenting as little different than non-Christian parenting. We raise our kids in the same way, with the same methods and (tragically) with the same expectations, just with a little bit of youth group thrown in. Why then are we surprised when we get the same terrible results?

For example. Think about how much time parents spend on planning for their kids. Planning to have them at a convenient time. Setting up college funds. In some places, getting an as yet unborn child on a waiting list for the premier daycare or preschools. Setting up schedules for the ever increasing number of activities that kids are involved in from piano lessons to sports. Planning intricate and expensive family vacations. Picking a church based on the youth program. Detailed examinations of colleges to make sure that little Susie or Bobbie get in just the right college so that they can get a “good job”. But what about the most important decision they will make? There is nothing that will have a greater impact on the bulk of our children’s lives than who they marry, and yet for so many parents that is not even on the radar, nor is it viewed as something that parents need to be actively involved in. Just raise ‘em the best we can and send ‘em out and hope for the best!

That is the impetus behind Voddie Baucham’s new book “What he must be…if he wants to marry my daughter”. It is high time that the people of God turn to the Word of God to see how to raise the gift of God that we have received in our children. This is not a book, as I am sure it will be caricatured by many, on arranged marriages or domineering patriarchy. It is a book that calls on Christian parents to take an active and intentional role in raising up our kids to seek the right kind of spouse and being deeply engaged in that process. It is also not just about helping our daughters marry godly young men, it is also about helping our sons become the godly men that Christian young women should desire to marry. This is, despite the title, not just a book for parents of young women. I would heartily recommend this book to parents who have just sons, married couples who don’t have kids yet, couples thinking about getting married, single adult women and men, teenaged girls and boys alike. I fully intend to have my girls read this book and then talk about it with them, because I can say with confidence that if they seek out a spouse in the manner and with the characteristics that Voddie lays out, they are far more likely to have a sustainable, happy and Biblical marriage. That is far more important to me than them “marrying well”, which means marrying a doctor or finding “Mr. Right”.

The chapters raise issues that will seem completely foreign to many parents. Our daughters should seek a young man who is committed to children? Huh? They should seek a young man who is a Christian, and not just a “church member” but someone who has a grasp of the Bible, is daily seeking God’s will in His Word, someone who is committed first and foremost to Christ. Have you ever thought about meeting a potential suitor for your daughter and engaging them in a discussion of theology to see if they really are in the Word or just going through the motions? In one of the chapters that will cause people to freak out, we should teach our daughters to seek young men who understand and embrace patriarchal male headship. What!? Yes indeed! When we teach our young women a watered down feminism that sees radical egalitarianism in family life as the “enlightened” model that they should seek, is it any wonder that they marry poorly and have families that are not run in a Biblical manner?

One thing that is clear in reading this book: it is unlike most of the books on marriage, parenting, courtship, families, etc. that you will find filling the bookshelves of “Christian” bookstores. Having perused a few of those books, and having seen first hand the effect those books have on the church, I can say that you are far better off pitching 99% of them in the trash. It is not hyperbole to say that this is one of the best, one of the most vital books on Christian parenting to come along in recent years (or even decades).

I have said before in earlier posts and I guarantee I will say again in future posts: weak families lead to weak churches. If you want to take a substantive step toward building a strong, Biblical, multigenerational family that will lead to strong, Biblical, multigenerational churches, the best thing you can do is read everything the Bible says about parenting and families. The very next step is to run, don’t walk!, to your nearest bookstore or online retailer, get What he must be...if he wants to marry my daughter by Voddie Baucham, read it, read it again and buy a copy for a friend.